The Nuclear Submarine U.S.S. Bodacious Resurfaces After Six Months of “Deep and Silent”
About five months ago, I bought a countdown clock that sits directly below my computer monitor, and for 157 days it’s been ticking down.
It’s been ticking down to my self-imposed deadline for the second draft of my behemoth epic novel (a series, actually). Last December, I set a deadline for myself: I would finish this draft by September 30, 2023.
Well, I finished two days ahead of time.
I’m proud of myself. If nothing else, I’ve been incredibly productive. In 157 days, I wrote 337,397 new words (or an average of 2,135/day); I revised 189,858 words (an average of 1,202 words); making for a total of 527,255 words (3,337/day). To do this, I routinely woke at 3 a.m. (especially during the final 30-day push) and worked 16 hours a day.
Speaking for myself, the second draft of every novel I write is usually the hardest. It’s the hardest draft because it’s the one in which you need to definitely determine what the story is, and you need to put in EVERYTHING so that when you start work on the third draft, you can focus on cutting. Basically, if you liken the novel-writing process to sculpture, the first two drafts are when you’re making your block of clay or marble, and in the subsequent drafts you chip away everything that doesn’t look like the story you’ve envisaged.
But now that the second draft is complete, I believe that all of that hard work has been worth it. My teen epic (the first of its kind) now totals 1,542,148 words. I did the calculations the other day, and the 1.5 million words of my epic is the equivalent of 300 five-thousand-word short stories.
Recognizing that modern readers prefer their stories in more compact, “bingeable” sizes, I have divided this Brobdingnagian tale into 14 more manageable “episodes” of about 100,000 words each, and when I publish the series in approximately two years, I’ll do it serially—with a new installment coming out every two to three months.
I’ve been working on this teen epic for eight years now. Eight years. In the time that I’ve been writing, the planet Earth has revolved around the sun eight times; the world underwent catastrophic upheaval from COVID-19; and my nephew, who was five years old when I started, celebrated his 13th birthday (but he’s still into Legos—good for you, dude).
And to power this word output, over the course of these eight years, figuring a conservative average of 5 cups per day, I have drunk 14,600 cups of coffee.
The second draft is done, but there’s obviously a lot of work to do on the series. Starting in December, the work will shift to revision, particularly to paring down the mammoth manuscript. My aim is to cut about 300,000 words (or 20%) so that when I finally publish the series, it will be a dozen volumes of 100,000 words each. This will make my series twice as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Why am I fixated on all of these numbers, you ask? Well, I’ve written about this on my blog before—and mentioned it in interviews and podcasts—but novel writing is as much a numbers game as it is a words game. In order to write a novel—and especially a long novel—you have to produce a lot of words (at least 1,000) a day, and you have to produce consistently.
And to produce consistently, you have to drastically reduce (if not eliminate) the distractions in your life. You have to—selfishly and unequivocally—make your writing the center of your universe. This means not engaging with social media. It means not spending as much time with your friends as you might like. It means sacrificing sleep, family gatherings, birthday parties, Christmas parties, movie premieres, vacations, and even knowing what’s happening in the world.
The computer I use for writing does not have an internet connection; I have purposely set up my work process and tools to be free of the internet. (Indeed, I enthusiastically agree with novelist Jonathan Franzen who in his “Ten Rules for Novelists” writes (Rule #8) that anybody with access to the internet while they’re writing is probably not producing very interesting fiction.) I check my email once a day (on my phone), and I only go on the internet about once a week. There are only two people in the world with whom I text regularly: my wife and Jason Scott Sadofsky. I don’t have commercial TV (only streaming), so I don’t watch the news or see commercials for products. I don’t listen to the news on the radio, and if I’m listening to music on the local classical or classic rock station and the news comes on, I shut it off.
Over the years a few people have asked me what it’s like to be a novelist, to spend all of your waking hours (not to mention your sleeping hours) inhabiting and writing about worlds of your own creation. To answer their question, I’ve given people a number of analogies, but I think the best one is that it’s like being on a nuclear submarine when it’s gone “deep and quiet.”
You’re submerged, umpteen fathoms down, cut off from the rest of the world, focused exclusively on your mission. Over the course of those eight years, I’ve probably gone “deep and quiet” for five or six months a dozen times. This means that I’ve been out of touch, focused on nothing but my mission, for approximately five of the last eight years.
While “deep and quiet,” however, I’ve had to contend with the equivalent of fires aboard my submarine, but I haven’t let those divert me from my mission to write and FINISH my epic-length series. Over the past eight years I’ve had to write through tooth abscesses and implants, contracting COVID, a broken hand, getting sober from alcohol (I will have 5 years’ sobriety on 11/11/23), car breakdowns, my spouse getting sick with COVID (and taking care of her), moving, house-hunting (without success 3 separate times for six months to a year), computers dying, an uncle dying, “runner’s knee,” and back issues. The back issues became such a problem (even despite my $2,000 Aeron chair) a few months ago, that I had to get a motorized sit-stand desk.
Invariably, when I resurface after one of these long “deep and quiet” periods, a lot of stuff has happened—stuff that other people encounter and deal with in their daily lives, but which I know nothing about. When I resurfaced earlier this week, here are some of the things I just found out about:
– Ukraine is beating back Russia.
– Putin is still a major DICK.
– The Island of Maui burned to the ground.
– The economy of Venezuela collapsed, and thousands of refugees have been hiking north through the jungles of South and Central America to get to the U.S.
– There’s a new Student Loan Forgiveness program.
– Chad Lookabaugh, the local tennis pro I took lessons from and did workouts with, died suddenly in January. He was a great guy, and I’ll miss hanging out with him in the winter in front of the fireplace in the lobby of his tennis club.
– Inflation is a very real thing; yet, mysteriously, gasoline prices remain steady (hmm…).
– Kids’ cereal icons Count Chocula, BooBerry and FrankenBerry now have a female counterpart (well, it’s about time!) named Caramella.
– Sadly (because I own a good amount of Tesla stock), Elon Musk seems to be behaving like Veronica’s dipshit rich brother in the Archie comics.
– The makers of products—especially food—are up to their old tricks again with shrinkflation: charging you the same (or more) for less product.
– The U.S. government shut down, or is/was about to shut down, or something.
– And instead of Cracker Jacks, it’s now all about Cracker Jills (good riddance, Jack; you and your friggin’ mutt on the package had like a 90-year run, and towards the end I COULD NEVER FIND YOU F-CKS anywhere!).
What’s my point? Although it’s a bit of culture shock to resurface and learn that so many things have changed while I’ve been preoccupied—on my mission as it were—I don’t regret a minute of it. For the past eight years, I’ve been happily ensconced in 1986–87 America, specifically in the world of teenagers at that time. I can’t tell you anything about what’s going on right now, but I can tell you that in October 1986 the U.S.–U.S.S.R. talks at Reykjavik broke down, and that in November 1986 the Iran-Contra scandal came to light. I can tell you that in September 1986 the song “Venus” by Bananarama was at the top of the charts, and Huey Lewis and the News’ “Stuck with You” was rising on the charts as well. I can tell you that in October 1986, during the season premiere of Dallas, it was revealed that everything that happened in the previous season—when Bobby Ewing died—was a dream in Pam Ewing’s mind.
For eight years I’ve been inhabiting a world when the U.S. was on top, when China was just a country with almost a billion people that rode bicycles everywhere, when the U.S.S.R. was crumbling, when Ronald Reagan was President, when “cellular telephones” were extremely rare and were bigger than military walkie-talkies (see the beach scene in the original Wall Street)l, when The Cosby Show was #1 on TV, when phone booths were still available, and when—GASP—there was no internet.
I’ve been submerged here for quite a while, though, and so it’s good to come up for some 2023 air. With this in mind, I’m giving myself the entire month of October off. What am I going to do? Take naps. Hike. Swim. Lift weights. Run. Climb a mountain or two. Stretch. Play with my dog. Seek out typewriters at vintage stores. Visit vintage clothing stores for apparel for my editor alter-ego (to debut in November or December—stay tuned). Listen to jazz and classical music (anything but ’80s rock and pop, which is all I’ve been listening to for eight years). Have some great meals out. Go to Boston. Go to the Adirondacks. Buy a set of cross-country skating skis for what I hope will be a record amount of snowfall this winter.
And last, but not least, read about 20 books (a dozen of them will be re-reads) during the break so I’m not thinking about my teen epic, including Lolita, Robinson Crusoe, The Odyssey, Goldfinger, The Longest Day, High Adventure, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Editors on Editing, Immediate Fiction, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, a book about fonts entitled Just My Type, and books on grammar and punctuation as I prepare to undertake my favorite part of the writing process in December—revision, editing and polishing.
Right now, however, I’m archiving my work on this draft and printing the completed draft. It’s staggering to see the stacks and stacks of pages I’ve produced to bring me to this point—the dozens of legal pads of longhand notes and pages from the novel; the hundreds of pages typed on one of my typewriters and scanned and OCR’d into the computer; the dozens of spiral notebooks of character sketches or scene ideas; the reams of ’80s pictures and research files. All of this material is being boxed up and stored out of my purview.
I printed two copies of the novel. One copy is stored in my basement, and the second is in the trunk of my car. Each copy is 2,915 legal pages (single-spaced). These are solely emergency hard-copies—in case all of the 10–12 hard drive and USB stick backups of my writing are suddenly wiped out by an EMP.
For the past 30 years that I’ve been revising my writing, I’ve always made hand-edits on printed pages, then entered those changes into a word processing file. But having just finished the 2nd draft, when I engaged in that process for literally thousands of pages, each page with dozens and dozens of small edits on it, I realized that if I want to finish this colossus sometime during my lifetime (seriously, I want to publish in the fall of 2025), I can’t use this paper process anymore. It triples the amount of time that revisions take.
No, sir…this time I’m going hi-tech.
For this part of the process my darling wife just bought me a new Microsoft Surface tablet, which will enable me to read the novel anywhere and either make edits on the device or at least put in short comments, flagging spots that I need to fix. Anyway, I’m excited about it because I have a feeling it’s going to make this part of the process much more efficient.
The moment I got the tablet, I gave it a serious test. The hardest part of the process was getting it updated, logged in, etc., but once that was done I loaded THE ENTIRE 1.54-MILLION-WORD NOVEL onto this thing that weighs about a pound, is smaller than a sheet of paper, and only as thick as 20–30 sheets of paper (maybe). It’s incredible, and I am confident that it’s going to revising the 3rd draft much, much more efficient.
My plan for this coming draft is as follows:
1. Take the month of October off completely. Dedicate my days to working out, eating well, going places with my dog every day, going to thrift stores, going out to lunch with friends (all 2 or three of them). On rainy days, I’ll consolidate the papers (random notes, reference materials, etc.) and come up with a master list of ’80s-related “stuff” that I want to make sure I work into the novel.
2. Starting November 1, I will read (without editing; not an easy task for a novelist) the entire series. This reading will be done in three main ways: a) on the tablet, b) on the printed hard copy, and c) with the “computer lady” reading the book to me as I walk on the treadmill and work out—maybe even as I’m hiking! While reading, I will NOT be making revisions; this first read is to try to get a view of the entire forest, to step back and see the vista without becoming obsessed about one or two trees.
Rather than making edits to the manuscript, I plan on keeping audio recordings (this is where the tablet comes in) of notes of errors, things to fact-check, and overall impressions of each day’s reading, chapters and episodes. Keep audio recordings of all this stuff so I don’t stop reading to make edits. Do a journal entry every evening with that day’s impressions—what pages I covered, my gut impressions of that day’s material, and my thoughts on what will need to be revised.
3. Starting December 1, literally putting on my editor’s hat (stay tuned), I will begin the revision and editing. I’m giving myself one year to revise the entire series. My plan is to quickly “swoop” through the entire series three times in a year, starting by making the largest revisions (any big CUTS that need to be made) first, and gradually making my revision and editing more granular as the year goes on.
The main way in which this draft is going to be different from the process I’ve used with all of my previous books is this: there will be NO hand-corrections made to a paper draft that then need to be entered into the computer. In the past, this is the part of the process that has consumed the most time. Honestly, I really, really prefer this leisurely, tactile method, but I don’t have the luxury with this behemoth novel—not if I want to release it in late November 2025. With the tablet, I’ll be able to read and/or listen to the book and make edits to the file itself.
Honestly, though, I’m a little sad that I have to give up the paper editing. Especially in the fall, when one of my favorite things to do in life is to sit on my deck with a hot cup of coffee, a crisp stack of pages, and a red pen. But there will be other, shorter novels for that.
The most important thing for me in the coming year is to just get the sonovabitch DONE. I’m breaking the year up into three 120-day “swooping” periods; during each 120-day cycle, I plan to “swoop” through the entire manuscript, starting with identifying large sections that can/should be cut, and making my revisions and editing increasingly granular with the next two “swoops.” My plan is that by next December (2024) I will have gone through the entire 14-episode series three times. And then, in 2025 and 2026 I’ll polish each episode prior to publication.
Check back here in late October or early November for the debut of my editing alter-ego.
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